In .357 Magnum, the lead, Joe Saeba, is assigned to protect a concert pianist, Nina, and help her find her long lost father. Along the way, it's discovered that she is carrying a microchip with valuable information that foreign spies will do anything to get. With the help of some friends, he gets to the bottom of the whole matter but not before several high speed chases and lots of explosions take place. Think of this as a decent James Bond style show with better writing. I don't want to spoil the whole show for you if you haven't seen it but suffice it to say, it was good.

Picture: The picture is presented in full frame 1.33:1 ratio. The movie was made in 1988 and shows some of it's age but looks pretty good nonetheless. The dvd mastering job obviously took some time as the print looked much better than a release I saw of this one awhile back on tape.

Sound: You get the choice of listening to the stereo track in either English, English with song subtitles, or Japanese with English subtitles. To be fair, the English dub was slightly better here in my opinion and my usual bias is towards the original language. The subtitles were not simply dubtitles either with subtle differences between them and the dub track.

Extras: The main extra was an episode of the original television series "One Cool Sweeper" which was, I believe, the first episode of the entire series. Pretty cool extra. The other extras were some trailers to other ADV releases but that's it.

Final Thoughts: I'd never seen the series this was based on but I really thought it was fun to watch. In fact, I'd really be interested in seeing the series released in boxed set format (ie: a season at a time) if the price was right. Sure, it's an older anime release which gets it's strength mainly from good writing rather than flashy mech-robot designs or high tech anime styles. If the series is half as good as this movie, I suspect ADV will release it as their busy schedule permits.

My personal tastes in anime run toward the science fiction or fantasy related shows but every once in awhile, I see a movie like this that draws me in beyond what I would have expected. As such, I'm suggesting it as recommended but I can easily see where people would think I'm being too conservative in my assessment based on the show's strengths.